This is a visually stunning, yet also rather confusing, exhibition about the
Northern Renaissance

Can’t say there are too many mornings I wake up and feel complete empathy for Henry VIII, but it turns out I was wrong. You know that temptation to avoid the cold cut of the razor for a day, only for the lady in one’s life to insist you stop being so unkempt and lazy? Well, apparently, poor Henry suffered the same nag from Catherine of Aragon.

A pair of miniature portraits, from 1526, by Lucas Horenbout – one of Henry stubbly, the other clean-shaven – were even commissioned to allow the king and exigent queen to decide which look suited him best. Five centuries on, the images can now be seen, along with 130 others from the royal collection, in an exhibition on the Northern Renaissance.

Taking place in northern Europe between 1450 and 1600, this was a period marked by challenges to established Church teaching by thinkers such as Erasmus and Martin Luther, their ideas spread far and wide by the newly invented printing press. A key debate surrounded the suitability of devotional imagery – often extending into outright iconoclasm – and, in such a climate, secular subjects in art grew popular, especially portraiture and mythological scenes.

The Netherlander Hans Memling was a master of the former. With works like Portrait of a Man (1475-80), he pioneered the so-called “three-quarter” pose (halfway between profile and full-frontal), catching his subjects seemingly on the move.

Memling’s popularity with the many Italian merchants of Bruges hastened his style’s dissemination in Italy, influencing Leonardo da Vinci in portraits like Ginevra de’ Benci. It’s one of the frustrations of this show that it does little to investigate the links between the Northern Renaissance and its more famous, Italian equivalent.

A friend of Giovanni Bellini’s and keen visitor to Venice, Albrecht Dürer was another artist in the thick of north-south cultural dialogue. The top printmaker of his day, peerlessly precise of line in capturing texture and form, it was he who brought the proportion and perspective of Italian Renaissance art back to Germany.

Yet, Dürer also retained a fantastical Teutonic sensibility, a fondness for Gothic excess. In A Knight, Death & the Devil (1515), a lone knight rides through an oppressively dense German forest, confronted by nightmarish visions of Death and a goat-faced devil. Snakes, skulls and spiky bushes also block the way, with a far-off, hilltop castle our only form of pictorial escape.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, meanwhile, another German great, worked in Wittenburg as court painter to Frederick the Wise of Saxony, the protector of Martin Luther. Cranach became good friends with the theologian; he served as best man at his wedding, as well as visual propagandist for the Reformation, illustrating Luther’s German translation of the New Testament.

His scenes of classical myth would have appealed, too, to the humanist scholars at Frederick’s court. The Judgment of Paris (1530-5), based on the Trojan prince’s judgment as to which of Venus, Juno and Minerva was the fairest goddess, reconsiders the story as an allegory on the respective merits of a sensual, active and contemplative life.

The real stars of the exhibition, though, are Hans Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII’s aristocracy – his preparatory chalk drawings every bit as penetrating as his finished paintings. A steadfast Sir Thomas More appears near a shifty Sir John Godsalve and haughty Sir Richard Southwell, while an age-worn Thomas Howard has surely seen too much.

As for the bruising Master of Revels, Sir Henry Guildford, his chunky face in the original drawing becomes a chiselled face in the final portrait – one suspects, at the “polite” insistence to Holbein of Guildford himself. It’s thrilling to be up close and personal with players from the turbulent Tudor past – scrutinising their images for a hint of their ultimate (often bloody) fates.

If only for the agglomeration of great works on display, this exhibition comes highly recommended. Yet I left it rather muddled as to how (and where) the interplay between art, politics and religion in the Northern Renaissance actually worked. Would a show called “The Protestant Reformation”, say, have been markedly different? Was the Northern Renaissance, primarily, an art movement or historical period?